Re: artlang-blindness of linguists (was Re: [FWD: Artificial Descendants of Latin (New Book)])

On Tuesday, December 9, 2003, at 10:31  AM, Jörg Rhiemeier wrote:

> Hallo!
>
> On Tue, 9 Dec 2003 04:33:50 -0500,
> Jan van Steenbergen <ijzeren_jan@...> wrote:
>
>>> [book on artificial descendants of Latin]
>>
>> Oh well, Wenedyk, Jovian and Carrajena were all started less than two
>> years
>> ago, IIRC. Work in progress, you know. Whatever bits of Wenedyk he
>> could
>> have retrieved from the Internet one year ago would definitely be
>> wrong
>> now.
>>
>> But it is a pity that he even neglects Brithenig and Kerno, or any
>> artlangs
>> for that matter. Well, it might have escaped his attention that some
>> constructed languages have been designed for artistic reasons only;
>> the
>> list of languages discussed is certainly impressive and interesting,
>> but
>> without exception all languages that appear in the book are auxlangs.
>> A
>> missed chance.
>
> Very true.  This blindness towards artlangs is something I have noticed
> in numerous books whenever it comes to constructed languages.  The mere
> existence of artlangs is usually completely ignored.  One even finds
> definitions of the terms "artificial language" and "constructed
> language" that include the phrase "...for the purpose of international
> communication".
It has not escaped the author's attention that languages may be
constructed for personal or artistic reasons. He is also the author of
_A Priori Artificial Languages_ and _Mixed Artificial Languages_. In
the preface to the former he said: "I am primarily interested in those
languages which were constructed with some serious purpose in mind. A
fair number of languages, or (much more often) fragments of languages,
have been created in connection with some work of fiction (usually
science fiction or fantasy), or game, or fictional world."

Also, if you consider how volatile our projects are, it is not
surprising that they don't show up in scholarly or even popular
literature unless they're affixed to something like a movie or
best-selling novel. The development of the Internet and the World Wide
Web has only fueled the transitory nature of our languages; even
Tolkien, using only pen and paper, couldn't resist tinkering with
Sindarin and Quenya, and that even after the books were published and
the "corpora" were fixed.

So any discussion of artlang projects would have to be rather general
and vague (if there is discussion at all); they're moving targets. I'm
just happy that constructed languages of any stripe are receiving
serious attention from a sympathetic scholar.

Dirk
--
Dirk Elzinga
Dirk_Elzinga@byu.edu

"No theory can exclude everything that is wrong, poor, or even
detestable, or
include everything that is right, good, or beautiful."    - Arnold
Schoenberg


--
Dirk Elzinga
Dirk_Elzinga@byu.edu

"No theory can exclude everything that is wrong, poor, or even
detestable, or
include everything that is right, good, or beautiful."    - Arnold
Schoenberg